


What He Took

by CenozoicSynapsid



Category: The Bone Key - Sarah Monette
Genre: Cthulhu Mythos, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-05
Updated: 2015-12-05
Packaged: 2018-05-05 03:07:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5358746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CenozoicSynapsid/pseuds/CenozoicSynapsid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A small figurine, dredged up from a shipwreck... and the ones who want it back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What He Took

**Author's Note:**

  * For [soupytwist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/soupytwist/gifts).



> "What He Took" expresses Booth's considerable unease with transformation and hybridization, and his attempt to engage with the complex legacy of the northeastern Atlantic trade ports. As bell hooks puts it, "Imperialist nostalgia takes the form of reenacting and reritualizing in different ways the imperialist, colonizing journey as narrative fantasy of power and desire, of seduction by the Other. This longing is rooted in the atavistic belief that the spirit of the “primitive” resides in the bodies of dark Others..." (1992). Booth's text both challenges and reenacts this narrative fantasy, using imagery borrowed from Shakespeare's descriptions of shipwrecks: "Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks / Ten thousand men that fishes gnaw'd upon / Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl / Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels" (Rich. III).  
>   
> Dr. L. Marie Howard, MSLIS, PhD  
> Senior Archivist, Department of Rare Books  
> Samuel Mather Parrington Museum

I could not bring myself to strip, but I took off my shoes and socks before I walked down into the sea. The air was chilly, scented with salt and bladderwrack. The water was freezing. My feet touched smooth stones and rough granite sand before the numbness took them. The undertow tugged at me, the littlest finger of a sleeping god. When the water was up to my chest, I took out the little figurine of greenish-black stone. Set against the gray blankness of the sky and the pewter dullness of the water, I could at last appreciate it for the masterwork it was. What had seemed, in the Parrington, to be odd quirks or imbalances of design, were harmonized by the setting, and for the first time, I found that I liked it. I threw it as hard as I could, and watched it arc, end over end, into the water.

* * *

The figurine had not endeared itself to me when it first arrived at the Parrington, nor to the rest of the staff. It had been a donation of Elliot Hope Maxwell, a distaff cousin of the Parringtons. He was a dilettante who fancied himself a scientist, and had squandered a considerable part of his family fortune on his exploratory ventures. We had already been forced to accommodate a “shed skin of the Mongolian death worm” from his expedition to the Gobi; the wretched thing hung flaccidly in one of our less accessible alcoves as a reminder of the sacred duties of client to patron.

His latest _idee fixe_ was the recovery of his grandfather’s brig _Euphrosyne_ , which had gone down in a storm off Gull Point, taking with it Jehu Hope, his crew, and an unknown cargo from the South Pacific. To this end he had purchased a dredging outfit and a variety of expensive brass and leather diving suits, and was often seen on the waterfront, where he had chartered several fishing smacks to ferry his entourage and equipment around the shallows, prospecting for treasure.

That he would not have recognized the _Euphrosyne_ if he had found it did not deter him, nor did it inspire him to spend any time with the Parrington’s extensive collection of archaeological journals. Identification, he seemed to think, was our job, and he sent us his discoveries, still dripping with the muck from which they had been excavated, in biweekly installments. The finds had so far been extremely unimpressive, but Dr. Starkweather loved a squanderer, or at any rate, one who might be persuaded to squander in our direction, and insisted we make at least a token examination of his offerings.

I was put to work for a few days looking through Hope’s logbooks, which Mr. Maxwell had given us “in case they might come in useful”. They did not. Hope had been nearly silent about his cargo and his daily affairs, enough so that I suspected his business had not been strictly legal. Most of the book was taken up by cursory records for each of his crewmen, with marks against each indicating how much they were owed and how often docked for punishment. Their names suggested a mix of origins; the bosun and mates were white, but the cook was Malay, and many of the hands Polynesians. I doubted they had liked him much; the roster showed a steady stream of punishments, and more than one man had deserted, leaving his salary unclaimed. Two names were crossed through in heavy black ink, with no explanation at all for the losses.

My report convinced Dr. Starkweather that the logbooks were unworthy of further attention, and I abandoned them without regret. I sent Mr. Maxwell a copy as well, but I do not think he read very much of it.  
“Mother always told me Grandfather had his rough edges,” he said airily, the next time he passed me in the corridor. “But she never thought there was any harm in him.”

* * *

I was not typically present for the opening of the crates. They were unlikely in the extreme to contain anything of interest to an archivist. But I happened to be in the archaeological laboratory when this one was brought in, and my attention was drawn by Dr. Ainsley’s horrified exclamations as he opened it; one of the clay vessels inside had disgorged a quantity of foul-smelling mud and a live, squirming hagfish down the front of his waistcoat.

I was assisting in cleaning up the floor when Dr. Ainsley found the figurine. It was perhaps six inches high, made of a heavy, greenish-black stone so finely polished that it shed the mud like water.

“Any idea what this is, Mr. Booth?” asked Dr. Ainsley.

I had to confess I had not. The dimensions of the thing suggested a figure, but one abstract in the extreme. There was a hint of contrapposto in its curvature, and things that might have been limbs curved out against a body rounded with sinuous muscle. But the limbs, if they were limbs, undulated implausibly; the head, if it was a head, had a disturbing smoothness to its features, as if the sea had sanded down nose and mouth to mere formless gashes, leaving intact only its bulging, luminous eyes.

The rest of the crate contained potsherds, a badly corroded anchor and what might have been a shell amulet, or perhaps the craftsmanship of a particularly careful whelk. The figurine was the only object of significance. The staff were deadlocked as to its origin. Dr. Ainsley believed that Maxwell had finally found his wreck and that Hope had obtained the statuette in Polynesia. Miss Coburn argued in response that the thing did not resemble the art of any Polynesian culture, and that Gull Point was a notorious graveyard of shipping in which Maxwell might have found nearly anything. It was agreed, at any rate, that the thing should be put on display. It was finally set in the short hallway connecting our small South Pacific collection to Oriental Arts. The legend beside it read simply: “By generous gift of Elliot Hope Maxwell”.

It was by and large an unpopular exhibit, one which most visitors glanced at and then walked past slightly more rapidly than they had approached. Some few, it is true, found the thing queerly fascinating, and gazed at it for minutes at a time. But though I myself found it unappealing, I took no special pains to avoid it. It was not until winter began to set in, and the fishing captains to refuse Maxwell’s offers of charter with warnings of roughness and coming storms, that the dreams began.

* * *

I was walking on Prospect Hill, in a street where stately colonial houses, each topped with its widow’s walk, looked down over the harbor. Beside me was one of the museum curators, and as we strolled, he began to talk idly over his research.

“Old Jehu Hope was a piece of work,” he said. “Have you seen his real captain’s log--- the one he didn’t keep for the excise men? It bears reading over sometime, if you have the stomach for it.”  
“I haven’t managed to find it. Is it in the archives?”  
“Not at the Parrington. I saw it once at another museum.”  
“What did he, er, write in it?”  
“All sorts of things. He ran slaves out of Whydah for a while, and when the British banned the trade, he turned pirate in the Malacca Strait. That looked too hot for him after a while, and he went back to his old ways--- blackbirding coolies in the South Seas.”  
“What’s that?” I asked, for the term was unfamiliar to me.  
“Kidnapping, in plain language; he’d fetch up on some out-of-the-way atoll, lure as many as he could onto the ship with the promise of a drink or a dance or some such, and then his men would force them into the hold with clubs. Sold them off as laborers in Queensland or Peru--- wherever the planters weren’t scrupulous. He made himself a tidy fortune doing it.”  
“I didn’t, er… the Maxwells don’t tell it that way."  
He laughed shortly.  
“Make him out as a dashing rogue, do they? Wicked and charming?”  
“I suppose so, yes.”  
“He was a monster,” he said. I was standing face to face with him, though by the strange logic of the dream, I could not tell whether he had turned toward me or I to him. There was a strange intensity in his countenance. I tried desperately to remember which curator he was and whether he had any personal engagement with the matter, but I could not.

“What he took wasn’t his,” he said. “You remember that, when the time comes.”

He reached out long fingers to take me by the shoulders, but I shrank back from his grasp and found myself suddenly awake. Into my dream-addled brain came strange thoughts of the little figurine and how Jehu Hope might have gotten hold of it. I was a long time getting back to sleep.

* * *

Over the next few days, the memory of the dream faded, though I was troubled with a vague unease, and found myself avoiding the waterfront and the smell of sea air. As I walked to the Parrington one early morning, I felt a prickling between my shoulder blades, as if hearing the footfalls of an unseen pursuer. Nobody was behind me. I imagined suddenly that it was the sea itself that was stalking me, waves rippling quietly through back streets. Waiting in ambush, formless and inexorable.

Foul weather had set in, and I worked late several nights in a row, hoping the rain would quiet before I went home. I was cataloging a collection of folk ballads collected in the fishing hamlets a bit further up the coast; the songs harmonized with the rattle of rain at my window. They were the entertainments of harsh, hard-working people, never very distant from one form of violent death or another. Over and over, as I sat up with my lamp and notebook, I recorded lovers stabbed, fishermen drowned, whalers’ skulls smashed in by their quarry.

There were several songs about selkies and mermaids, most of them having originals in Britain and common up and down the Atlantic coast. But a few seemed unique to the region; there were several about the “Wreck of the Pharisee”, whose captain’s name was variously Thorpe, or Stroop, or Horne. The Pharisee was an hour from the safety of harbor when her captain saw a mermaid beckon him to his doom, and ran the ship onto the reef. With the names of Hope, and the _Euphrosyne_ , fresh in mind, it took little imagination to supply the originals which the cycle of memory and performance had corrupted. But the rest of the tragedy was described with the usual vagueness of such songs; Thorpe’s crew cried out for their wives or parents, and drowned one by one. It was the last of these verses that most puzzled me:

_Now up and spoke the topmast man,_  
_And an angry man was he,_  
_A curse on Captain Thorpe, he cried_  
_For what he’s done to me._

_The mermaid called him down and down,_  
_Till he felt his face turn strange._  
_“Ah, now I know what I shall be_  
_When the sea has made me change.”_

Had he cursed Captain Thorpe for wrecking the ship, I wondered, or for some other misdeed? And why should his face turn strange as he sank into the depths? There flashed in upon me suddenly a disquieting vision: a man’s face turning suddenly rubbery and smooth, like the face of a porpoise, the neck opening into the florid pink of gills, the lipless mouth gaping with needle teeth. It was a grotesque fancy, I thought, a product of overwork and the storm outside my window. But once in mind, it was not easily dismissed.

* * *

I made up my mind to put away my work and go home while I might still manage an hour or two of sleep. It was a cold night, and the rain was falling in sheets; I was soaked to the skin before I had come ten feet from the door. By the time I had let myself into my apartment I was shivering in long, slow convulsions, and my numb fingers fumbled with my buttons as I undressed. It seemed too much effort to light the fire. I curled myself beneath the covers and fell into an exhausted half-sleep.

When I woke, I knew I would be ill. There was a feverish lightness to my muscles, and though I could tell I was warmer than normal, I shook with chill as I tried to pull back the covers. I pulled myself to my feet for long enough to pour myself a glass of water and build up a haphazard fire in the grate. Even this trivial effort had me swaying with exhaustion, and my throat ached as I drank. Unable to do more, I lay back down and fell into a vague drifting state in which my bed seemed to rock slowly on a placid, limitless ocean.

* * *

I followed the mermaid’s voice down, down, until the cold of the water faded and I felt the pressure of the depths around me like an embrace. A dark shape loomed ahead of me, and I saw that it was a ship, lying on her side at the base of a jagged seamount, with little silvery fish flitting in and out of her shattered hull.

I made my way through the largest opening and looked about myself. The timbers of the decks were mostly gone, and I stood in a large open space through which shafts of dim light shone in from the distant surface. Here and there were set stone plinths like altars. There were statues upon them, creatures whose forms partook equally of shark and cuttlefish, lobster and turtle. They reached out fins and spiny sucker-footed arms like starfish and the gossamer tendrils of sea wasps. Glyphs were written beneath them that must have been the names and orisons of these alien gods. But I could not read them, and suspected that no human mouth could have shaped the sounds they represented.

By the walls, alcoves of slate held offerings from other oceans than the cold and colorless north Atlantic: bright corals and strange, long-spined shells. Toward the bow, I saw the glint of metal, and as I drew closer, saw objects gleaned from centuries of wrecks: a gold chalice set with rubies, a dragon carved in jade, a Greek amphora, upon which fish-tailed Triton brandished his trumpet…

As I made my way back toward the entrance, I saw that the plinth closest to the opening was empty. I was suddenly certain of what had been displayed there. Maxwell’s dredge had scraped blindly across the sea bed, brushed in at the door and caught up the least of the temple’s wonders, hiding it in a load of muck and refuse.

Beside the plinth was another low alcove, and I bent to look within. It was sealed with a pane of some glassy substance, behind which was a whip of tarred rope and a pair of iron shackles. Next to it was a figurehead of carved wood, its coat of garish paint faded and worn. It might have been a woman--- might once, perhaps, have been Euphrosyne, goddess of mirth. I had passed among the uncanny idols and displays with no trace of fear, but the sight of these stirred misgivings within me. Jehu Hope took what was not his, and this was the symbol of his fate… But the little green-black figurine was now at the Parrington.

I woke gasping, my sheets drenched with sweat.

* * *

The worst of the fever was over by morning, but it left behind a lingering weakness I found hard to shake off. I was back at work the next morning, shrugging off my colleagues’ concern with assurances that I was quite well. But in fact, I did little that day but wrap my hands around a cup of half-drunk coffee, sit at my desk and shiver. It was another two days before I felt fully recovered.

That morning was clear and viciously cold; the wind had shifted overnight, wiping away the rain and fog of the past few days. It was a refreshing change. I wrapped myself up well and resolved to step out at lunch for some fresh air.

The streets were not crowded, and most of the passers-by were muffled to the eyes against the chill. As I turned upwind to return to the Parrington, I too began to feel it was hard going, and wonder if I had been overambitious so soon after my illness. Outside the old Lyceum Theater, I ducked into the portico to shelter myself while I caught my breath. Concentrating for the moment on slowing my breathing, I did not see the man in black approaching until he was directly in front of me.

“Mr. Booth, I believe?” he said, tipping his black silk hat politely, and I looked up suddenly at him. I could not make out his features; he wore a heavy greatcoat, and had wrapped his scarf tightly around his face so that only his eyes protruded above it. But there was something foreign in his accent, and a disagreeable boneless floppiness to the hand he extended towards me. I did not shake it.

“I am, er, afraid I can’t quite remember who…”  
“Quite all right,” he said, and the scarf twitched, as if the unseen face behind it was smiling. On the other side of the street, the river lapped softly against the stone embankment. His eyes followed mine.  
“We are fortunate to meet here,” he said apologetically. “It is difficult to get much further away than this, or I could have called at your office.”

I was glad that he had not.

“You have come about the, er, the statue?”  
“I have.”  


His voice, under the accent, was solemn and slightly formal, as if we were colleagues. I could hear the unsteadiness in my own.

“Jehu Hope did steal it, then? In the South Pacific?”  
The man shook his scarf-clad head slightly.  
“It was always ours. You would be surprised to learn how long ago it was made.”  
“What was it that Hope, er, took, then? That wasn’t his?”  
“People, Mr. Booth. My own father among them.”

He seemed amused by my expression of surprise.

“Your kind and ours are close relatives, comparatively speaking. Those in whom the influence is strongest can be… altered. But not all the men could be saved, and even those who were could not go back to their islands again. When they drove that ship onto the reef, they expected to die.” “Is it the survivors who built the temple?” 

At this, the man broke into full-throated laughter. It was an inhuman sound--- a sharp, high wailing, like the scream of a gull. The scarf lifted for a second, and I glimpsed sharp white teeth before he restored it.

“A temple, Mr. Booth. Ah, that is really quite good.” He chuckled again, and I winced inwardly at the sound. “No, those gods have not been worshipped for hundreds of years. And I am no priest. I fancy we are in the same line of work, more or less.”

I stared at him. And I thought again of the alcoves, and plinths, and legends, and began, myself, to laugh, leaning helplessly against the freezing stone of the pillar.

“Shall we call the statue, er, a visiting exhibition?” I asked.  
“Quite so,” he said. “I am glad to find you so understanding.”

* * *

I went down to the shore the next morning. Afterwards, I stood shivering on the beach, watching the surf froth in and out. I was not sure what I was waiting for. But I think I was glad, in the end, that I did not see it.

Dr. Starkweather was angry when the little figurine went missing. And I suspected Elliot Hope Maxwell might find another beneficiary on which to lavish the remainder of his inheritance. But perhaps the Parrington had seen enough of Jehu Hope’s money. There are more kinds of inheritance than one, after all. And more kinds of monster.

**Author's Note:**

> This is your "trip to another museum" story. It is also a reworking of "The Shadow over Innsmouth", which is a classic Lovecraft story that also happens to be pretty racist. I think Monette likes to react against these subtexts in Lovecraft's work, so perhaps this fits the pattern.  
> I think the dates for Jehu Hope's unpleasant career work out reasonably. He must have left the Atlantic slave trade fairly late (in the 1840s or so) and became a blackbirder early in the 1860s.  
> "The Wreck of the Pharisee" is a variant on Childe 289 "The Mermaid".  
> Thanks to my beta, who shall be temporarily anonymous.


End file.
